Translation

ALDA MERINI

Image Credit: Giuliano Grittini at it.wikipedia, Wikimedia Commons

Alda Merini’s linguistic and thematic passion, intensity, and mysticism made her one of the major Italian poets of her generation. She was born in 1931, and by the time of her death in 2009, had published more than 60 collections of poetry and an autobiography, L'altra verità. Diario di una diversa (The Other Truth: Diary of a Dropout) (1986) in which she explored madness in creative expression.

She was nominated twice for the Nobel Prize in Literature, once in 1996 by the Académie Française and again in 2001 by the Italian PEN Club. Her work is well-loved in Italy but is only beginning to be known in the English-speaking world, most especially with the recent publication of Susan Stewart’s Love Lessons: Selected Poems of Alda Merini (Princeton, 2009).

Jensen has a partner in this work, Chiara Frenquelluci, who was born in Rome and has been teaching language and literature for over twenty years. She has published articles on Italian theater, fiction, opera and poetry, a critical edition of 17th c librettos, as well as textbooks and multimedia eBooks. The translation below is by Frenquellucci and Jensen and appeared in tearsinthefence (U.K.) #63, Spring 2016, p. 57.

When they would slip a noose around our necksand throw us on naked cotsalong with filthy bottle shardsto push us toward self annihilation,then on drenched foreheadsappeared the sweat of sacred gardens,of those damned olive gardens.When the bastard nurseswould lift our putrid skirtsand sneer, sneer green, it was in that precise momentthat we wanted to be stoned to death.When strapped onto the crapperto undergo the Cerletti,*it was in that moment that the Gestapo won,and our goddamned bodiesdared not strike to the right and to the left for the resurrection of mankind…

*Cerletti invented electric shock treatment.

KAROLINE VON GÜNDERRODE

Karoline von Günderrode (1780-1806) was born in Karlsruhe to an impoverished family of the lesser nobility. Her meditations on love and death drew upon and advanced mythological scholarship. She wrote abundantly, often publishing under a male pseudonym, and had three loves in her life, each ending badly. After the third she killed herself on the banks of the Rhine.

The poem below was translated by Jensen and Monika Totten. Totten is a retired scholar whose doctorate is from the Harvard Department of Germanic Literatures and Language. The translation appeared in Tears in the Fence (U.K.), no. 57 summer 2013.

Once earth seemed a rough, tight path. And in the mountains Heaven glowed, And at earth’s side, a deep abyss was Hell, And paths led up to Heaven, and to Hell.

But now everything’s entirely altered, Heaven has collapsed, the abyss filled inAnd paved with reason, and very easy walking. The heights of faith have been demolished. And knowledge strides across the smooth flat earth,And measures everything, in fathoms, cords, and feet.